The first step to making reliable IoT devices is understanding that they are inherently unreliable. They will never work 100% of the time. This is partially because we firmware engineers will never write perfect code. Even if we did, our devices need to operate through various networks and gateways, such as cellular modems, mobile phone Bluetooth applications, Wi-Fi routers, cloud backends, and more, and each of these may introduce unreliability.

PC applications that interact with MCUs are used by developers for a number of reasons, such as data visualization, monitoring during testing campaigns, and command and control via a GUI. In this article, we’ll explore mapping an MCU’s peripherals to your personal computer to simplify development of PC applications built for embedded systems. Like Interrupt? Subscribe to get our latest posts straight to your mailbox.

The C printf function is a staple of embedded development. It’s a simple way to get logs or debug statements off the system and into a terminal on the host. This article explores the various ways to get printf on Cortex-M microcontrollers.

Using an RTOS is often a tradeoff between the ease of decomposing tasks, with the complexity of the scheduler itself. There exists a middle ground between highly complex systems that may require an RTOS, and simpler ones that can be easily modeled using a super loop.Since ARM is the most popular embedded CPU and almost every ARM processor has a hardware scheduler, it would be interesting to make a compact framework utilizing these features.

In the dynamic realm of embedded systems, the right combination of hardware and software components can transform the development process and empower engineers to build robust and efficient solutions. This article explores a streamlined device-to-cloud embedded design utilizing the STM32G0 Nucleo board from STMicroelectronics, an AWS IoT ExpressLink module from Espressif, AWS IoT Core for secure MQTT communication, and Memfault for remote debugging.